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Virtual reality allows users to enter an unreal world in order to escape their everyday problems. But as VR technology advances and proliferates, acts that would be crimes in the real world have crept in.

Jordan Belamire was the victim of one such “crime.”

The incident went down while Belamire (a pseudonym) was playing a game called “QuiVr.” In real life, she was standing next to her husband in her brother-in-law’s living room. In the game, users travel around a snow-capped mountain killing zombies with a bow and arrow. Her avatar, like all other avatars in the game, was simply a disembodied, floating helmet and two hands clutching a bow. The only indication that other players would have of her gender would be her voice.

Belamire was having a great time mowing down the undead next to another user, whose handle she identified as BigBro442. Then, in between waves of zombies, BigBro442’s avatar turned to Belamire’s avatar and started to rub near her virtual breasts.

Major conspiracies theories, such as a faked Moon landing, would have been exposed within just a few years if they were really true, a scientist has concluded.

Oxford University physicist Dr David Grimes worked out a mathematical way to calculate the chances of a plot being deliberately leaked by a whistle-blower or accidentally uncovered.

He was able to show that the more people share in a conspiracy, the shorter its lifespan is likely to be.

For a plot to last five years, the maximum number of plotters turned out to be 2,521. To keep a scheme operating undetected for more than a decade, fewer than 1,000 people could be involved, while a century-long deception had to include fewer than 125 collaborators.

Applying the technique to four real-life scenarios showed that had the moon landings been a hoax - involving an estimated 411,000 people who worked at Nasa - it would have been found out in three years and eight months.
Back on Earth, a climate change conspiracy with 405,000 conspir…

“In twenty or fifty years, taking a personalized blue pill you just hallucinate in an entertaining way and then a white pill brings you back to normality is perfectly viable,” said Hastings. “And if the source of human entertainment in thirty or forty years is pharmacological we’ll be in real trouble.”

Drugs as recreation certainly aren’t a new concept. But what Hastings seems to have in mind sounds straight out of the science-fiction film The Matrix. (Hastings isn’t the only Silicon Valley CEO on a Matrix kick lately. Tesla and Space X CEO Elon Musk may well have had the science-fiction trilogy in mind when he recently said there’s a chance we’re all living in a computer simulation.)

Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941), which turns 75 this month, is Donald Trump’s favorite movie. It’s not hard to see why. The film tells the story of an American tycoon, the inheritor of a great fortune, who spends his life vainly pursuing the love he lost in childhood. His historic career takes him right to the cusp of great political power—the governorship of New York—but he falls short thanks to his own hubris.

Something in Charles Foster Kane’s relentless pursuit of more—more wealth, more possessions, more influence—strikes a very definite chord with Trump, as he himself admits. “I think you learn in Kane that maybe wealth isn’t everything,” Trump told documentary filmmaker Errol Morris “because he had the wealth, but he didn’t have the happiness.” Or, as Kane puts it early on in the film, “You know … if I hadn’t been very rich, I might have been a really great man.”

But Kane is about more than just the damaging, isolating power of wealth—or “accumulation,” as Trump puts it. Wel…

On the evening of October 30, 1938, radio listeners across the United States heard a startling report of a meteor strike in the New Jersey countryside. With sirens blaring in the background, announcers in the field described mysterious creatures, terrifying war machines, and thick clouds of poison gas moving toward New York City. As the invading force approached Manhattan, some listeners sat transfixed, while others ran to alert neighbors or to call the police. Some even fled their homes. But the hair-raising broadcast was not a real news bulletin-it was Orson Welles's adaptation of the H. G. Wells classic THE WAR OF THE WORLDS.

In BROADCAST HYSTERIA, A. Brad Schwartz boldly retells the story of Welles's famed radio play and its impact. Did it really spawn a "wave of mass hysteria," as the New York Times reported? Schwartz is the first to examine the hundreds of letters sent to Orson Welles himself in the days after the broadcast, and his findings challenge the conv…

A front page of The New York Times from Sept. 12, 2001, autographed by five U.S. presidents and showing the burning World Trade Center has sold for $11,000 at a New York City auction.

The signatures are Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. The ex-presidents signed while attending a national day of remembrance and prayer for Sept. 11 victims at the National Cathedral in Washington days after the attacks.
Read More: Washington's Top News

I actually own one of these September 12th, 2001 New York Times newspapers, having saved it for 15+ years now. Too bad there are no Presidential signatures on my copy.

A photo of a young Syrian boy covered in dust and blood in an ambulance that was viewed by millions and became the face of Aleppo's suffering is being called fake by Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad, a claim that contradicts numerous witness accounts on the ground in Syria.

The boy, five-year-old Omran Daqneesh, was pulled from a destroyed building in the besieged part of Aleppo's Qaterji neighborhood after a Syrian or Russian airstrike on Aug. 17, according to locals, including medical sources and the White Helmets, a volunteer civil defense group that rescued the boy. On social media, many users said that they were particularly moved by his photo because he looked dazed and confused and wasn't crying despite the obvious injury to his head.

A video showing Omran touching his wounded head and wiping away the blood without shedding a tear went viral and has come to symbolize the humanitarian suffering in Aleppo. Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton mentioned the boy's st…

The Mission of Iraq, which sits on a wealthy Upper East Side block near Central Park, has a dark secret: it’s basement was used as a jail equipped for torture under Saddam Hussein’s regime, The Post has learned.

When he rose to power in 1979, the despot had the terrifying “detention room” installed inside the five-story building at 14 East 79th Street — right across from billionaire former mayor Michael Bloomberg’s home, according to two Iraqi officials speaking on the condition of anonymity.

Saddam’s henchmen – known as Mukhabarat agents — frequently imprisoned local Iraqis in the basement for up to 15 days at a time, using them as leverage to get their relatives back in the homeland to surrender and cooperate with the tyrannical government, the officials said.

“It was a dark room. The doors were reinforced in a way that nobody could break in or out. You didn’t need to sound proof it,” one official said. The other official added, “You’re not going to hear someone screaming down ther…

Native Icelandic and alternative pop singer Björk wants you all to know nature turns her on. Yes, as in sexually.

According to a new interview with the Evening Standard, Björk has always found animals sexy, despite also liking what much of the world finds to be traditionally sexy.
“I like bestiality,” the singer continues. “I get turned on by nature. I don’t find urban brothel situations very hot. But that’s just my taste… like, National Geographic porn.”
You might be able to infer her love for bestiality from some of her feminist music, which has been around for over two decades now. Rather than outwardly using sexual lyrics, she tends to include a lot of moaning and unique, suggestive sounds into her songs, which makes it easy for the listener to project their own sexual fantasies. You could even argue such sounds are more primal-sounding than anything else.
Read More: Elitedaily.com

The Michael Richards exhibition on Governors Island, curated by Alex Fialho and Melissa Levin, proves what an astonishing loss it was when the artist was killed on 9/11. Richards had spent the night in his World Views studio as part of his Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) residency; when a hijacked plane crashed into the 92nd floor of the World Trade Center’s north tower, it killed him. Rumors quickly swirled that he had foreshadowed his own death with the sculpture “Tar Baby vs. St. Sebastian” (1999), for which he had used his own body as a model. Photos of the work showed a fleet of mini airplanes piercing a Tuskegee Airman’s body, the jets uncannily similar to the one that destroyed Richards’s own body in the disaster.
Read More: The Prescient Work of an Artist Killed on 9/11

“Radio”? How 1930s. The modern-day counterpart of the famous detective’s iconic wristwatch is the Apple Watch.

4. Handheld Communicator (Star Trek III: The Search For Spock, 1984)

The Star Trek franchise inspired many of today’s modern technologies, from 3D printers to medical tricorders. The crew’s handheld communicator, first featured in the ‘60s TV series, is the father of today’s mobile phones.

5. Tablet Computers (2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968)

In Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi classic, two astronauts are seen having breakfast, while watching multimedia content wirelessly on a flat, rectangular device. Inspiration for the iPad, no?

The U.S. military has announced it will now pay for gender reassignment surgery for transgender soldiers.

The move follows the Pentagon's decision in June to lift its ban on transgender troops serving in the military.

Now any soldier whose ability to serve is 'adversely affected by a medical condition or medical treatment related to their gender identity,' they will be eligible for reassignment surgery or hormone therapy, according to the Defense Department.

Children of soldiers and retirees will also be able to take advantage of the new transgender health benefits such as hormone therapy.
Read More: Daily Mail

Ever hear about the gargantuan octopus that dragged a New York City ferry and its 400 passengers to the river bottom nearly 53 years ago?

A cast bronze monument dedicated to the victims of the steam ferry Cornelius G. Kolff recently appeared in Battery Park at the southern tip of Manhattan, erected a stone's throw from a handful of other somber memorials to soldiers, sailors and mariners lost at sea or on the battlefield.

But if you can't recall the disaster it could be because the artist behind the memorial, Joseph Reginella, made the whole thing up.

The 250-pound monument, which depicts a Staten Island ferry being dragged down by giantoctopus tentacles, is part of a multi-layered hoax that also includes a sophisticated website, a documentary, fabricated newspaper articles and glossy fliers directing tourists to a phantom Staten Island Ferry Disaster Memorial Museum across the harbor.
Read More: Newsday

A controversial foreign PR firm known for representing unsavory characters was paid millions by the Pentagon to create fake terrorist videos.

The Pentagon gave a controversial UK PR firm over half a billion dollars to run a top secret propaganda program in Iraq, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism can reveal.

Bell Pottinger’s output included short TV segments made in the style of Arabic news networks and fake insurgent videos which could be used to track the people who watched them, according to a former employee.

It’s been a complicated question for a character with a complicated history, but if you ask Greg Rucka, the writer behind Wonder Woman for DC Comics in the 2000s, the iconic superhero is indeed “queer.”

In fact, Rucka added, “I don’t know how much clearer I can make it.”

Speaking to Comicosity, he said the character had “obviously” been in love and had relationships with other women on her homeland of Themyscira, an island on which only Amazon women live, something which has been hinted at in some of the newer Wonder Woman stories.

He went on to say that he is not a fan of prioritizing “representation” over plot and character development, despite the character’s sexuality having long been speculated upon by fans.

“The character has to stand up and say, “I’M GAY!” in all bold caps for it to be evident,” he said. “For my purposes, that’s bad writing. That’s a character stating something that’s not impacting the story.”